Reddit mentions of Social Distinctives of the Christians in the First Century: Pivotal Essays by E. A. Judge

CONTINUED

> Or Jesus didn't die, he was misdiagnosed or faked his death.

Absolutely not a possible explanation. In the Jewish conception, a resurrected (not, keep in mind, merely resuscitated) body was glorified, undecayed, incorruptible and indestructible.

They would not have seen a half-dead man with a bloody, lacerated back, raw and scabbing holes in his limbs, barely able to move from exhaustion and blood loss and thought “Wow, he’s been resurrected and given his eternal, glorified, undamageable body!”. At best what you’d get here is them thinking God had saved him from death.

Plus how on earth would he manage to convince Paul or his companions in a state like this? They were hunting Christians for the money, and were fully convinced Jesus was a false prophet who’s followers were worthy of death. They would have arrested this escape artist Jesus the moment he tried to say the first word about Christianity.

And even if by some unprecedented miracle he managed to do it, none of these explain in the slightest how he was able to do something no other religious movement before or since in history has ever done: fundamentally reject its culture’s values, and yet survive and thrive in it. (And not only that, but then eventually overtake that culture and replace the culture’s values with its own)

Every single time we see a new religious movement survive (let alone thrive) in a culture, it conforms to that culture’s values. If it does not, then it will try to leave the culture (becoming isolated and forming its own culture, like Mormonism for example did by settling far away in Utah) or change itself and absorb those values (as Mormonism also did on many issues they differed with their culture on, such as polygamy).

Christianity is a case unlike all (and I mean all) others in history. We do not see this anywhere else, ever. In no other cases does a movement that fundamentally rejects its culture’s values and goes against them in major ways (such as having a crucified man as its God in a society where crucifixion was the lowest shame and honor was the most important thing) ever even survive like this within a culture, much less thrive and certainly not conquer like we see Christianity do. Its sudden, very rapid expansion among the last people we’d expect is especially unparalleled - most of whom would have heard the spreading word that the disciples were crooks who had forged the whole thing. So it was a message offering something they didn’t want (resurrection, rejecting all their culture’s values, and persecution) from honorless people they had no reason to trust.

But not only did they manage to convince large numbers of people, the people they convinced were the last ones they should have. The upper classes – those with the means to investigate these claims the disciples were making, and the most to lose and least to gain by joining the movement – were very disproportionately represented numbers-wise.

This can be found, among other places, from examining the names of first-century Christians. As discussed here on pages 141-144 (to get to those search for the phrase “startlingly high”), "The study of nomenclature provides a controlled way forward into the question of social rank and status in the Pauline communities...Of the 91 individuals named in the New Testament in connection with…Paul, a third have Latin names. It is a startlingly high proportion, ten times greater than in the case of an extensive control group of non-Romans [that was] checked.”. The control group, he notes in footnote 17, are “1064 Greeks”.

So it notes that we have two options, either “that the affectation of Latin names by Greeks was much higher in…Paul’s circle than in the circles whose inscriptions have come down to us”, or “the more serious possibility, that many of the Latin names in the Pauline connection were not affectations, but the legitimate marks of Roman citizenship.”

So essentially, either early Christians came from groups who had a bizarrely high tendency to give themselves upper-class names, or early Christians were disproportionately upper-class. We can be confident its not the former, since, as it notes further: “most of the New Testament Latin names are cognomina. While some of these also had currency as Greek names, the high level of correspondence between the Pauline list [of names] and that of the popular cognomina of Roman soldiers suggests…Roman citizenship”.


And we can also look at some of their professions and other economic indicators of status to verify this, as http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/first/congregations.html notes: “The traditional view of the composition of the early Christian communities...is that are from the proletariat. Early Marxist interpreters of Christianity make a great todo with this. It's a movement of the proletariat...But if you… look at the Book of Acts, and you look at Paul, and…begin to collect the people who are named, or identified in some way, here you have Erastus, the City Treasurer of Corinth; you have Gaius of Corinth, whose home is big enough to let him be not only Paul's host but the host to all of the Churches of Corinth, all of the little household communities can meet in his house at one time. You have Stephanos and his household who have been host to the community. You have Lydia, in Philippi, who is the seller of purple goods, a luxury fabric. You have Prisca and Aquila, and we wonder why the woman is usually mentioned before her husband. She must be a woman of some consequence, who runs a tent making establishment…”.


So we find the last sorts of people we’d expect to find believing these dishonorable men and their shame-filled claims eating it up and joining them in droves.


Sane humans only do what they believe to be beneficial. So clearly there was something powerful that persuaded these people that, despite the huge risk involved (such as a guaranteed loss of honor for becoming a Christian in a society where that was the most important thing, among more tangible threats), it was beneficial for them to become Christians and proclaim that Jesus had been resurrected.


Something so powerfully convincing that the movement does something no other religious movement, before or since in history has ever done.
None of the given explanations, and certainly not this latest one, even approach explaining what that is. There is only one so far in this discussion that has: a genuine resurrection of Jesus.

>Courtesy of /u/Irish_Whiskey

Sounds like he needs a little bit less of the creature :P